On a rainy Saturday morning in January 2007, Henry Yang, chancellor of the University of California, Santa Barbara, took an urgent phone call. He excused himself abruptly from a meeting, grabbed his coat and umbrella, and rushed across the windswept U.C.S.B. campus to the Solid State Lighting and Display Center. The research group there included one of us (Nakamura), who had just received the Millennium Technology Prize for creating the first light-emitting diodes (LEDs) that emit bright blue light. Since that breakthrough over a decade earlier, Nakamura had continued his pioneering research on solid-state (semiconductor) lighting, developing green LEDs and the blue laser diodes that are now at the core of modern Blu-ray disc players.

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